Underland
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
Occasionally, once or twice in a lifetime. If you're lucky, you encounter an idea so powerful in its implications that it unsettles the ground you walk on. The first time I heard anyone speak of the wood wide web. I was trying not to cry. A beloved friend of mine was dying too young and too quickly. I had gone to see him for what I took to be the last time he was tired by pain and drugs. We sat together talked. My friend was a woodsman. Trees grew through his life and thought his grandfather's surname was would he lived in a timber framed house that he had built himself and he had planted thousands of trees by hand. Over the years, I have sap in my veins. He wrote once that day, I read aloud a poem that was important to us both birches by Robert Frost. In which climbing the snow, white trunks of birches becomes both a readying for death and a declaration of life. Then he told me about new research. He had recently read concerning the interrelations of trees. How when one of their number was sickening or under stress, they could share nutrients by means of an underground system that can join their roots beneath the soil, thereby sometimes nursing the sick tree back to health. It was a measure of my friend's generosity of spirit that so close to death himself, he could speak ungenerous lee of this phenomenon of healing. This network also allows plants to distribute resources between one another sugars, nitrogen and phosphorus can be shared between trees in the forest. This network also allows plants to send immune signaling compounds to one another. A plant under attack from aphids can indicate to a nearby plant via the network that it should up regulate its defense response before the aphids reach it. It has been known for some time that plants communicate above ground incomparable ways by means of diff usable hormones. But such airborne warnings are imprecise in their destinations. When the compounds travel by underground networks, both the source and the recipient can be specified. Our growing comprehension of the forest network asks profound questions about where species begin and end about whether a forest might be best imagined as a super organism and about what trading sharing or even friendship might mean between plants and indeed between humans.